THE SORDID LEGACY OF THE PANDORA OF PORN; (1)as the Worlds First Porn Star, Linda Lovelace, Dies at the Age of 53 ,(2)DEEP THROAT WAS HAILED AS A BEACON OF NEW SEXUAL FREEDOMS.IN FACT, AS THE TRAGIC LIFE O F ITS STAR PROVED, IT WAS ANYTHING BUT

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TWO days ago Linda Boreman, a 53-yearold woman, died in a Denver hospital from injuries she suffered in a road accident.

Her death would have made little impact except for the fact that she had another name which was famous throughout the world.

In 1972 Boreman, then known as Linda Lovelace, starred in Deep Throat, a sex epic which went on to be one of the most profitable films ever made.

It was also a pivotal moment in post-war permissiveness. Costing [pound]15,000 to make, it has so far grossed more than [pound]500 million and counting.

There had never been a porn film like it and its success inspired dozens of imitators, creating the backbone of the multi-billionpound porn industry which flourishes today. Yet the film's profit is one of the least remarkable aspects of Deep Throat's legacy.

Lovelace, born the daughter of a traffic policeman in the Bronx, New York, played a character with a clitoris in her throat that gave her an insatiable desire for oral sex.

But she was not just a porn star.

She was also a cultural cruise missile who blew open the Pandora's box of pornography, making filth fashionable and giving birth to the sex-soaked culture that now pervades the internet and satellite television.

Not that she had this intention.

Indeed, Lovelace has always contended that her appearance in Deep Throat was forced on her by her first husband, Chuck Traynor, at the point of a gun.

Instead it was the liberal culture of America's academic Left which really gave the film its opportunity to pave the way for the millions of porn sites which now pollute the internet.

From the outset, Deep Throat was seized upon by artists and intellectuals as a radical attack on the comparatively constrained sexual morality of the early 1970s, when prosecutions of filmmakers and magazine publishers who dared to publish sexually explicit material were far more frequent.

It was commonplace for the movie to be shown at university film societies and small art cinemas which were happy to risk prosecution because their patrons believed Deep Throat could be used as a rallying cry for a new era of sexual freedom and promiscuity. WILLIAM Walton, the late composer who wrote music for the Queen's coronation, sneaked away from a performance of one of his choral pieces at an Oxford college to watch Deep Throat at an art cinema.

In fact, the film and the industry it spawned would destroy the gullible woman who starred in it.

As its popularity spread, Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, moved Lovelace and Traynor into his Playboy mansion where they became stars at his parties. Hollywood celebrities, directors and other cultural icons would seek out Lovelace to praise her contribution to 'sexual freedom.' By 1974 the film had cult status and its acceptability in the social mainstream encouraged other pornographers.

With 18 months there were more porn films in production than ever before and it had become fashionable for porn to be shown at society parties or gatherings of radical intellectuals. All this hype was based on the proposition that Deep Throat had some intrinsic cultural merits because it displayed a world in which men and women did whatever their desires suggested.

The undercurrent was that everybody would be happier if they could live like Linda Lovelace. Naturally the reality was different, more shocking and far more disturbing for those who claimed Deep Throat was an act of revolutionary subversion.

When Lovelace herself later came forward to tell the true story behind Deep Throat, she revealed a tale of brutality and drug use that would now be familiar to anyone who has taken even the slightest glimpse into the seedy world of pornography.

Ironically, given the manner of her death, Lovelace met Traynor, her Svengali, only because of a road accident in 1970 in which she was injured. …